Peace Talks
by onekisstotakewithmex
Summary: He's alive, so he thinks, and he's home, insofar as it can be called home when he hasn't set foot in his own house in three years. In other words, Hawkeye is adjusting... slowly. Set post-war.


He still wakes up some nights to the sounds of screaming kids that aren't there, with the burn of homemade booze, sour in the back of his throat. For a few seconds, before he's truly awake, all he can hear is choppers overhead and feel the chain of his dog tags against his throat. He still isn't used to the notion that he's waking up in Maine, not in Hell, or as the locals called it, Korea. After three years away from Maine, he can't quite call it _home_ , insofar as it hasn't quite registered in his confused cranium that he really is back here, and not in the Swamp.

He's home, insofar as Maine can be called home. At least here, he doesn't have to worry about bugging out any time soon.

Though bugging out is the least of his worries. Though the war is over, every night in his dreams, it's like the "horrors of war" hit parade, and they're playing his song. Tonight is no different, because when he closes his eyes, all he can see is the face of Henry Blake.

 _Rule one is that young men die. Rule two is that doctors can't change rule one._

And isn't Henry like the rest of them? Weren't they all just young men, scared out of their minds and far away from home?

Benjamin Franklin Pierce is piecing his brain back together, the way he used to reconstruct kids, pulling them out of a sausage grinder and putting them through meatball surgery. It always comes back to meat, doesn't it? Between the sausage grinder and the meatball surgery, it was the closest Hawkeye ever got to real meat during his time in Korea.

He goes and leans against the desk, before flipping on the lamp.

The letters are still there, messy doctor scrawl in triplicate. Letters from BJ, from Potter, from Klinger – how he managed the messy medical scrawl without an MD is anyone's guess, but if anyone could do it, it would be Klinger – all going unanswered. And what's left to say?

Sure, Hawk was closer with the people of the 4077th than he'd been with anyone in his life, but what now? What is left to hold them together? War is the common denominator. Their common denominator, the _only_ common denominator.

He still hasn't gone back to work. He isn't sure he ever will. Hawkeye Pierce is tired of casualties, and tired of blood, and just plain tired. He is also very scared that one morning he'll wake up and find himself right back in the Swamp, covered in dust and blood that isn't his, with Charles's records playing, and a hangover he can't shake.

He snorts, looking out the window. The war is a hangover he can't shake. Reading the letters, it sounds like his fellow doctors and nurses, his friends, have adjusted to being stateside. Reading between the lines, they're struggling. They've all spent enough time reliving the war, and yet even if it means bringing each other into their own personal hell, they keep writing.

Hawkeye doesn't relive the war, if only because he never stopped living the war the first time around.

All Hawk has to do is answer his friends' letters.

All Hawk has to do is get on a plane, and go out to California to see Beej.

All Hawk has to do is never wear olive green again and never drink another homemade martini, and never have to save a soldier too young to shave.

He doesn't miss the constant tension or the threat of casualties or the terrible mess that had the nerve to call itself food.

Maybe the others can all settle into civilian life, and pretend like the war was one long, bad dream. Maybe they can settle into civilian practices and hospitals and domestic complacency, but Hawk can't.

Because the blood is still on his hands, and the sound of choppers still puts him in a cold sweat, and he can't pretend the war was a bad dream, because it's still there when he wakes up.

 _Rule one is that young men die. Rule two is that doctors can't change rule one._

He's never been able to change rule one, not since Henry first mentioned it to him, and isn't Henry himself proof that rule one can't be changed?

The war is over, so they say, but Hawkeye is still in peace talks with his fragmented brain.

God, he needs a drink. And Beej. And a lobotomy, while he's at it.

For now, however, he'll settle for sleeping.

And maybe _this_ time, when he wakes up, the war really will be over.


End file.
